Petaluma’s ‘Land of the Dead’

Petaluma’s first death was by potatoes.

In the fall of 1851, a farmer named Shirley was thrown from a wagon of potatoes and crushed beneath its wheels.

At the time, Petaluma was just coming into being. The year before, a meat hunter named Tom Lockwood set up camp at an abandoned Coast Miwok trading village along the Petaluma Creek to ship wild game to hungry gold seekers in San Francisco.

By the time of Mr. Shirley’s death, a local potato boom, launched by the Irishman John Keyes, made a squatters hamlet of the encampment. Along with a couple of trading posts, a potato warehouse and a handful of rustic cabins, the hamlet featured a makeshift general store, a hostel and an eating house erected by George H. Keller, a disappointed gold miner from Missouri.

Keller, Lockwood and a young man named Columbus Tustin buried Shirley’s body on the hillside across from Keller’s store, where Penry Park sits today. Keller read the service while the other men laid Shirley to rest in a coffin fashioned from redwood. A few months later, on January 3, 1852, Keller decided to turn the hamlet into an actual town.

Making an illegal claim to 158 acres of the Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio — a privately-owned, 13,000-acre Mexican land grant extending east of the Petaluma Creek into Marin County — Keller hired a surveyor named J.A. Brewster. With Lockwood’s help, Brewster platted a town on 40 acres running from the creek west to Liberty Street, and from Oak Street south to A Street.

At the center of town, on the hillside where Shirley was buried, Keller set aside land for Main Street Plaza (today’s Penry Park). Opening a real estate office at his store, he began selling lots in California’s new gold rush – land speculation. Among those buying was Tustin, who developed the town’s first subdivision, Tustin’s Addition, extending from First to Eighth streets, and A to F streets.

After selling his bogus landholdings, Keller returned to his farm in Missouri.

His founding of Petaluma wasn’t as much a land scam as a collective agreement among frustrated settlers. Prevented from homesteading on the Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio — whose legal ownership was in dispute — they willingly engaged in Keller’s charade in hopes of benefiting from a mutually profitable enterprise.

That Keller’s property sales were recorded by Sonoma County’s first recorder of deeds, William Boggs — the son of Sonoma County state assemblyman Lilburn Boggs — spoke to the extent of complicity in the charade, as did the federal appointment of Keller’s son Garret as Petaluma’s first postmaster.

The pursuit of gold, which drew most early settlers to California, was no different. Gold itself has no intrinsic value. It is a lie agreed upon. Its true value resides in the enthusiasm it ignites among people who believe in it. As David Starr Jordan noted, that enthusiasm ignited an ethos of “whatever is not nailed down is mine, and whatever I can pry loose is not nailed down.”

The final nailing came, as with most things, in death and the courts.

In the spring of 1854, a young woman known only as Miss Smith — daughter of a popular Petaluma settler named John Smith — died unexpectedly. Her death prompted townspeople to create a cemetery where Oak Hill Park resides today. In doing so, they expressed their shared desire to put down roots of generational continuity in the town.

At the time, Petaluma had grown to a population of 400 residents. Within three years, that figure would more than triple to 1,338 residents, 38% of whom were women. Their influence, along with the creation of five churches and two fraternal lodges — the Odd Fellows and Masons — helped to domesticate and civilize what had been a rough-and-tumble town.

That domestication included showing proper respect for the dead.

Although the average life expectancy at the time was only 38, much of that was due to childhood mortality. Those who lived to the age of 20 had a life expectancy of 60.

The eight acres for Oak Hill Cemetery were donated to the town by James and Mary Thompson, owners of Thompson Bakery on Main Street. Their daughter Josephine was the first settler’s child born in town on August 25, 1852.

The Thompsons purchased the Oak Hill property from Keller. A year after Miss Smith was buried, ownership of the cemetery reverted, along with the rest of Petaluma, to James Stuart, a San Francisco land speculator deemed the legal owner of the Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio by the California Land Commission. A legal challenge to the commission’s decision was dismissed in court.

Stuart promptly opened a real estate office in town for residents to purchase a legal property deed from him, regardless of whatever bogus deeds they held from Keller, Tustin, or other squatters. More than 200 residents shelled out a total of $70,000 ($2 million in today’s currency) to repurchase their lots from Stuart.

After overproduction put an end to the potato boom, Petaluma’s economy began to grow in the mid-1850s with the new California wheat boom. By 1858, the townspeople decided it was time to incorporate as a city, allowing for taxation of its citizens for things like schools, roads, and cemeteries.

Oak Hill Cemetery, by that time, was something of a mess, neither ornamented nor enclosed, the dead buried without any apparent order. The newly elected city trustees, or city council, set out to change that. They began by asking Stuart to donate the existing eight acres of the cemetery to the city, along with 20 additional acres for future expansion. Stuart agreed to the existing eight acres, but balked at surrendering more of his prime real estate.

In 1866, local grain merchant John A. McNear, who had made a fortune on the California wheat boom, lost his wife Clara to an early death. She died during an exceptionally rainy January, and McNear, worried about her grave flooding, set off to find high ground upon which to bury her.

Or so the story goes.

As Oak Hill Cemetery sat atop a hill, it seems more likely McNear recognized an opportunity at hand. For Clara’s final resting place, he purchased 40 hilly acres along Magnolia Avenue. Beyond the city limits at the time, it was not hindered by residential development like Oak Hill. After burying Clara on the hilltop, he laid out the rest of the grounds as Cypress Hill Cemetery and began selling plots.

Two local religious communities followed his lead, establishing their own cemeteries along Magnolia Avenue. In 1870, the Salem Cemetery Association, established in 1857 by German Jewish merchants, bought from McNear an 8-acre parcel – today’s B’nai Israel Cemetery – at the south end of Cypress Hill Cemetery. The next year, St. Vincent’s Catholic Church purchased 12 adjacent acres for Calvary Cemetery.

In 1879, city trustees voted to close Oak Hill Cemetery to further burials, citing a problem with rainwater draining into the downtown, creating a health hazard. They directed new burials of non-Jews and non-Catholics to Cypress Hill. City Hall watchdogs pointed out the rainwater from the cemetery flowed north, away from the downtown, running down Howard Street to West Street, and eventually emptying into the same seasonal creek as rainwater from the cemeteries along Magnolia Avenue.

The trustees stood by their decision, pressing residents to move family members buried in Oak Hill to Cypress Hill, with financial incentives from McNear. Those unwilling or unable to afford doing so were forced to leave their family members at Oak Hill, alongside the bodies of those buried far from home or whose families had left the area.

In 1900, the city decided to convert Oak Hill Cemetery into a park. By that time, thieves were stealing the marble tombstones and selling them to fish markets for counters. The city gave families six months to remove bodies still buried at Oak Hill before they leveled the grounds. The Odd Fellows paid to move former members to their plot at Cypress Hill, including Thomas Baylis, who opened one of the town’s first trading posts in 1851.

A number of bodies remained behind. That became evident in 1947, when the city designated Oak Hill Park for the site of a new hospital. First, they were required to remove of all human remains from the grounds. Before excavations could begin, the city killed the project after failing to secure the necessary government funding. A decade later, Hillcrest Hospital was built at the top of B Street instead of Oak Hill Park.

In 1876, a group of workmen leveling part of Main Street Plaza discovered the redwood casket of Mr. Shirley buried there by Keller, Lockwood, and Tustin. Shirley’s decaying bones were transferred to a new coffin, and reverently laid to rest in Cypress Hill Cemetery, where they remain today.